Staff leave and PTO software you own
Staff leave and PTO software you own: accruals, holiday-aware working days and live balances, with approval always a human act.
Staff leave tracking is the least glamorous software a business buys and one of the easiest to get subtly wrong. A team of twelve needs it a few times a year each, the total cost of getting it wrong is a payroll argument, and the hosted tools in this category price per employee per month -- charging continuously for something used in bursts.
This page is about what a leave register has to get right, and where the arithmetic hides.
Where the arithmetic hides
Weekends and public holidays. A request from Thursday to the following Tuesday is three working days, not five. A spreadsheet that subtracts dates counts five, and nobody notices until somebody's balance is wrong at the end of the year. Leavora counts holiday-aware working days, which is the single most valuable thing in the category.
Try the Leavora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Accrual timing. Monthly accrual sounds simple until you ask what happens to somebody who started on the eighteenth. Leavora credits a month only when the employee was employed at its start, with no partial-month proration, and says so plainly -- which also means a balance imported from a proration system reads slightly higher here. That is the kind of difference worth knowing before the import rather than after.
Carryover. A single cap per leave type covers most policies. Tenure tiers, negative balances and part-time proration by hours are deliberately out of scope, and a product that claims all of them without a test suite is claiming a lot.
Half days and leave types. Different rules per type -- annual, sick, unpaid -- because they accrue and deduct differently.
What owning the copy changes
The per-employee meter disappears. The licence covers the installation, so the thirteenth employee costs nothing and a seasonal team costs nothing twice. For a business where leave administration is a handful of decisions a month, that is the whole commercial argument.
The record is the other half. Balances, requests and decisions over several years are what a dispute is settled with, and holding them in your own database means the history does not end when a subscription does.
What to look for
Live balances rather than a monthly report. The balance answers a question somebody is asking right now.
Employee self-service, with the decision kept where it belongs. In Leavora, employees have their own login and can request; approving is always an administrator's act, including on their own request. That asymmetry is the feature, not a limitation.
A who-is-off calendar feed. So the team's absences appear in the calendar people already look at, rather than in a system they have to remember to open.
A decision that reaches the person. The employee hears the outcome by email through your own SMTP server -- and it ships switched off until you turn it on.
Exports. The team calendar and the balances as files, because the year-end conversation happens in a spreadsheet whatever the software does.
The limits, stated plainly
Leavora records leave. There is no payroll, no wage calculation and no HRIS integration -- it holds no pay rates at all, which is also why no email it sends can contain a pay figure. Single-tenant, one business per installation. Carryover is one cap per leave type; tenure tiers, negative balances and part-time proration by hours are out of scope by design rather than by omission. Monthly accrual does not pro-rate a partial month. Email goes through your own SMTP server and every employee-facing message is off until you enable it.
If the question is really about planning who works which shift rather than who is away, Rostera is the rota product and a different tool; teams that need both usually run both.
Questions people ask
Does it count public holidays as leave? No. Working days are computed with the holiday calendar applied, which is the difference between a correct balance and a plausible one.
Can an employee approve their own request? No. Employees request; approving is always an administrator's act, and the product makes no exception for a self-submitted request.
Does the price rise with head count? No. The licence covers the installation rather than the people in it, which is the point for a team that uses the system in bursts.
Where to look next
The product page is Leavora, with the whole feature record and its limits in the product's own words, and the Workforce Suite holds it with the related tools. The alternatives page covers one of the hosted leave trackers people arrive from, another covers a second, and the side-by-side sets them next to each other. For what those trackers charge per employee per month, read the observatory: each figure is quoted verbatim beside the date it was read and a link to the page it came from. Prices are on the observatory; read them on the date shown there.